The Works of George W. M. Reynolds — page 385: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

CHAPTER XXXIV HOPES AND INTRIGUES IN THE CONDEMNED CELI Ten days afterward, the sessions commenced at the Old Bailey, and Emmerson was placed upon his trial. As the fallen man stood in the dock, he presented a piteous spectacle indeed to the view of those assembled. All vital colouring had left his countenance, which was hideous in its ghastli- ness, and the dread expression of which was heightened by the unnatural fever-hght that burned in his wild, staring eyes. Most assuredly he did not then look like a man who was in much of a humour to hold forth on “ our blessed Constitution,’ ‘‘our glorious laws,’ and “ our admirable social system.’ On the contrary, he now found out to his cost that the Constitution, if any there be at all, was the very source whence flowed the barbarous, the atrocious, and the sanguinary laws which, in order to prop up the money interests of a vile social system, awarded the penalty of death to the man who committed a forgery. Such was the sentence passed upon Emmerson now; and when, after a six hours’ trial, during which his counsel had exercised all his eloquence and all his ingenuity to procure an acquittal, the prisoner was found guilty, and the judge from the bench pronounced his awful doom, then did the wretched man suddenly feel as if frenzy was seizing upon his brain, and he flung around him a look in which was ex- pressed the direst anguish that the mortal heart could know. But, ah! what eye encounters his own, and suddenly rivets his attention? Standing on a bench behind the thickest of the crowd thronging the court stood Theodore Varian. He had not appeared as a witness on the trial, because his evidence was not needed, the case being com- plete enough without his intervention, but he had been, 368 E@ORNIELOOOKS 5(EC)